Friday Column: Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Alternate History

Perhaps there is something to Judaism and alternate history, because now two of our most prominent Jewish writers (and a third, who isn't yet as prominent, but deserves more recogniton than he's received) have written works of alternate history. I speak of, Marc Estrin's Insect Dreams, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, and, now, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union takes place in a fictionalized Sitka, Alaska, a bustling metropolis of 3.2 million created prior to World War II by the U.S. government as a place to stick the waves of immigrating Jews. In Chabon's universe this settlement becomes even more important after 1948, as we soon learn that the modern-day state of Israel doesn't last very long, the Arabs once again expelling the Jews into the sea in that year.

This backdrop is casually, and believably, incorporated into the contemporary story of an alcoholic, down-on-his-luck Jewish homicide detective named Landsman. At the end of the year, Sitka is going to be "reverted" back into a regular American city (certain members of Congress try to grant the city permanent status, but, in a nice touch, they're defeated in part by fears of an emergent state of "Jewlaska"). This means that Landsman, and all his friends and colleagues, are uncertain whether at the end of the year they'll have a job, or even a place to live. Some estimate as few as 40 percent of the Jews will be permitted to stay in Sitka.

As you may have guessed by now--since the author is Chabon and the main character is a detective--there's an unsolved murder, and the meat of the story is taken up investigating it. Among contemporary American authors, Chabon is perhaps the novelist most willing to and successful at elevating genre fiction to the level of literature. A proper review of The Yiddish Policemen's Union would examine the extent of Chabon's success in this instance, the extent to which he successfully plays with the conventions of the detective story and turns it into something new and interesting, and although that's something I hope to do in the near future, that is not what I want to do here.

Instead, I'd like to wonder why it is that Jewish authors have lately turned to alternate history. There are some notable similarities between The Plot Against America and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and it's worth drawing them out. Roth's book is about a fictional presidency for the noted aviator, and fascist, Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh takes over in 1940, and under him, the country descends into a unprecedented wave of Jewish repression, even eventually forcing Jews to relocate. Although the story is a work of alternative history, it is meant to rejoin our own history, as after two years of pseudo-fascist rule the American people regain their sense, FDR is thrust back into power, and Pearl Harbor happens.

In both books, then, the basis of the alternate history is found in the Jewish diaspora inspired by World War II, and both concoct an America that treats Jews far more severely than the real America actually has. And yet, with America's history of repressing African-Americans and its Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, with current attempts by some politicians to turn Latinos into national scapegoats and the specter of Guantanamo and recent use of the FBI to infiltrate both leftist groups and Muslim-Americans, one can see why Roth and Chabon would feel a little antsy. By creating nightmare scenarios that very well could have happened, they seem to be asking why Jews have been able to avoid broad-based repression that the U.S. government, although not necessarily a hostile government, has nonetheless managed to hoist onto other minorities. Moreover, both seem to think that the period around World War II was crucial, a make-or-break time that American Jews managed to navigate safely.

At this point, Estrin's Insect Dreams is helpful. Although not a work of alternate history in the vein of Roth's or Chabon's novels, the book does remind us that directly before and during World War II, things looked bad for America's Jews. Taking its protagonist as Kafka's bug-man Gregor Samsa (Insect Dreams makes him a cockroach, but you can imagine him a beetle if you wish), the book places him into pre-war America, making him a member of Roosevelt's administration.

At one point the book asks whether Roosevelt would have gone to war earlier if he'd known about the mass murder of Jews. The answer, according to Estrin is "no." Samsa, receiving a letter from a friend living in Austria, becomes alerted to the beginnings of the Holocaust and feels it his moral duty to persuade the President to intervene, but citing an increasingly belligerent popular tone toward Jews (Roosevelt himself being mocked as "President Rosenberg" for even the meager help he has given up to that point) Roosevelt declares that his hands are tied. Estrin seems to be saying that although Roosevelt wasn't willing to give in to popular sentiment and repress Jews, neither was he willing to tread against the national hostility that would not approve of intervention to stop their mass murder.

In addition to reflecting on our past, The Plot Against America and The Yiddish Policemen's Union also reflect on our present. Roth has declared that Plot was not written to be read in terms of the 43rd President, but it is impossible not to draw connections: both Roth's Lindbergh administration and the current Bush administration bring to America a period of pseudo-fascism inspired by fears of an internal, subversive enemy that the American people, after things looking pretty grim, finally awaken from. However inadvertently Roth did so, when he wrote his book (before we knew whether America would regain its footing) he correctly predicted that America would eventually snap back to the center. Roth seems to be giving America half-credit: it's stupid enough to get into these repressive messes, but eventually it does get itself back out of them. In making this assessment, which I think is the right one, Roth explores the dynamics that lead the American government and people to time and again strike out at certain minorities, but then come back to center and try to undo the damage.

With Chabon, it is clear that he means to comment on the current administration. Although Bush is never named, it's hard not to see him in descriptions of the "current president" that include "cleft chin, his golfer's tan, his air of self-importance, worn lightly, quarterback-style." Yet where Roth opts for a quick, deep bout of Jew-persecuting hysteria, Chabon chooses the slow grind of bureaucratic indifference.

This is perhaps worse. Whereas Roth's hysteria at least has the benefit of shaming his Americans into quickly fixing their mess, Chabon's repression is quiet enough that it can become a fact of life. There's something frightening to seeing Chabon's millions of Jews simply accepting the fact that a sizable fraction of them will soon become non-citizens. Moreover, the legislation that enables this repression becomes just another bit of interest-group politics. Generally speaking, Chabon's politicians don't scuttle attempts to grant Sitka permanent status because they're anti-Semitic, but simply because of Congressional short-sightedness, of the fact that people thinking on a two-year horizon don't think much about abstract problems facing people living thousands of miles away from their district.

The whole idea of sticking Jews in Alaska seems a metaphor for this American political indifference, like some grand version of sweeping one's toys under the bed that the country seems stricken by. It's hard not to see a correspondence with contemporary politicians who continually inflating America's budget deficit, ignore the facts about global warming, and rely on oil to run the economy. Like the Sitka Jews, these are things politicians would rather not bother with, things that have been placed at a safe enough remove that they can be casually ignored. Although Chabon's book is specifically about how the system might have failed Jews, in a broader sense it is about how the system fails anyone in a position to feel the effects of such institutionalized neglect. As such, it is a good companion to Roth's book, which examines how the system fails people in a much more malign manner.

It's important to note, however, that neither book is an overtly political novel. They are primarily concerned with the lives of the people who are the subject of this repression. Lesser novelists, I'm sure, would have strained at making more of a point, at giving the politics an undue center stage. Roth and Chabon, however, are concerned foremost with telling a story, one that just happens to intersect with, to quote an oft-repeated line in Chabon's novel, "strange times to be a Jew."

But back to the original question--Why turn to alternate history? One obvious answer is that actual history hasn't provided an example of broad-based Jewish repression in America. A less obvious one would be that imagining a conspiracy against Jews speaks to the history of paranoia in America, something that Roth has certainly made much of and that Chabon, to a lesser extent, has also explored. (It's worth noting here that Estrin's third novel, Golem Song, explores Jewish paranoia as well, but not in an alternative historical universe.) These books are very much about the Jewish-American identity--notably, in Chabon's book Yiddish is the language of choice, with the Jews occasionally dipping into "American--and in subjecting Jews to grand conspiracies that instill real paranoia, they are exploring how real Jews might live with a continual feeling of paranoia, albeit not one founded on any known conspiracy.

Comments

[mek]

Very thought-provoking exploration of the alternative histories of these novels. While I've not yet read Chabon's novel, in reading your post, I was reminded of Elie Wiesel's quote on indifference: "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." I certainly hope Roth's prediction is correct that America is snapping back, despite the long way to go to recover from the current administration.